Copy-pastable ASCII characters with pdftex/pdflatex

by Martin Monperrus

This document presents how to obtain fully copyable PDF documents from Latex. By fully, I mean that all ASCII characters are copied into the equivalent binary character with Ctrl-C in a PDF viewer (evince, xpdf, acrobat reader, etc.) or with pdftotext in command line. Indeed, by default certain characters are transformed, eg. ' becomes ’.